Talk:Timeline of the far future

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Timeline of the far future is a featured list, which means it has been identified as one of the best lists produced by the Wikipedia community. If you can update or improve it, please do so.

This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured list on November 10, 2014.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
August 21, 2011	Featured list candidate	Not promoted
October 10, 2011	Peer review	Reviewed
January 15, 2012	Featured list candidate	Not promoted
August 18, 2012	Featured list candidate	Promoted
Current status: Featured list

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Information on this page was text-merged from the now redirected pages Exasecond and longer and 11th millennium and beyond. Please see here and here for full editor credit.

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Timeline of the far future article.
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Archives: Index, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5: 90 days

This article has been mentioned by a media organization:

Frauenfelder, Mark (25 August 2017). "Wikipedia's mindblowing timeline of the far future". Boingboing. Retrieved 9 September 2017.

Boltzmann brain source

The article claims that the estimated time for a Boltzmann brain to appear is $10^{10^{50}}$ years. I had a look at the source given and it says the estimated rate of the BB production is $\Gamma _{1B}\sim 10^{-10^{50}}$ (page 21 of the source). I don't know what this notation means. What does it mean? And does it really imply that the estimated time for a Boltzmann brain to appear is $10^{10^{50}}$ years? Remember WP:NOR. PeterPresent (talk) 09:15, 29 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It means that within a billion years, there is a one in

10^{10^{50}}

chance of one occurring. Which means that the most likely time for it to occur is

10^{10^{50}}

. Years, attoseconds, gigacenturies, teramillennia, whatever. At that scale, it makes no difference. Serendi ^podous 09:20, 29 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Adding 64-bit Version of UNIX Time 2038 Problem

I thought the 64-bit version of UNIX time's Year 2038 problem might be a possible addition to technological projects or calendar predictions at 292 billion years from now, and am looking for opinions on if I should add it. As far as I can tell this error doesn't have its own page, but is described and sourced (http://stablecross.com/files/End_Of_Time.html) on the 2038 page and described in more detail with a possibly broken source on the Unix time page. My biggest hesitation is that it is considerably longer than most things outside of the first section. Collectableblob (talk) 01:20, 3 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It used to be on here ages ago, but it was deleted on the assumption that we probably won't be using Unix then. Serendi ^podous 08:20, 3 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I reviewed the edit and discussion, I don't think it's worth pursuing anymore. Collectableblob (talk) 19:06, 8 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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Confidence?

Could we include some statement about the confidence of each statement, and it's basis? I think this list is super neat, but I also think it would be good to call out what is more likely, and what is more pure theory. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.107.14.168 (talk) 15:39, 23 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Sources don't always give confidence, and in any case, that's kinda what sources are for, so you can check the confidence yourself. They may, after all, be completely wrong. Serendi ^podous 16:53, 23 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

2030 AD to 2007 AD

2030 AD is as far as it goes. Going back to 2007.

"Subsequent to the present"?

In Future of the Earth, the Solar System and the Universe, I just corrected an item that said that by year 500,000, "Earth will likely to have been hit by an asteroid of roughly 1 km in diameter." Of course, Earth has already been hit by far larger asteroids, so this only makes sense if you consider this statement as "between the present and 500,000 years in the future". However, there are a number of items in this list that have the same problem.

The introduction does say "The timelines displayed here cover events from the beginning of the 11th millennium[a] to the furthest reaches of future time", but I don't think that corrects the problem.

I think the issue is that there are two types of events in this list:

Events which are likely to happen near an approximate date (e.g. the closest pass of red dwarf Ross 248)
Events which are likely to happen between the present and an approximate date (e.g. the supernova of Antares)

These are actually very different types of event: the first is based on current trends, the second is based on calculated probability. Can we somehow make it clear which type is which? Otherwise, people may misunderstand the items, e.g. that there's a 1km asteroid that is expected to hit Earth 500k years from now. -- Dan Griscom (talk) 19:09, 26 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

There is a note attached to all those probabilistic events that says that the event could happen at any point between now and then, but that the listed date is considered the most likely. Serendi ^podous 19:27, 26 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Well, at least one somewhat intelligent person (me) missed that note completely, and I'll suggest it is often missed. Given the importance of the distinction, I believe we should make it clearer.

What if, instead, we changed the way each of the "probabilistic" event times are shown? Here's a mockup:

	Years from now	Event
	10,000	[Event which is predicted to occur about 10k years in the future]
	0–10,000	[Event which has a 50% predicted probability of occurring within next 10k years]
	25,000	[Event which is predicted to occur about 25k years in the future]
	36,000	[Event which is predicted to occur about 36k years in the future]
	0–50,000	[Event which has a 50% predicted probability of occurring within next 50k years]
	75,000	[Event which is predicted to occur about 75k years in the future]

I think this would be a whole lot clearer than the current display. Thoughts? -- Dan Griscom (talk) 19:51, 26 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wouldn't it be simpler to just make the notes more noticeable? Serendi ^podous 20:14, 26 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Simple is good, but clearer would be better. And, what I'm proposing seems both simple and clear to me. Do you agree that it's important to differentiate between the two types of event? If so, do you think the current note (even if emphasized) clearly shows the difference between the two events?

A perhaps leading question: with ten different notes, do you think readers can keep track of what each means while they're going through the list? And, it's interesting that this note [b] is used eleven times, while the other notes are only used once apiece (except for one that's used twice), which implies that a "note" isn't the way to show this information. -- Dan Griscom (talk) 20:25, 26 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Alpha Centauri / Proxima Centauri

Our article Proxima Centauri states that Alpha Centauri will be closer in about 25,000 years, and the graphic in List of nearest stars and brown dwarfs#Future and past implies Alpha Centauri will be closer starting in somewhere between 24,000 and 26,000 years. Why are you restoring demonstrably false statements? — Arthur Rubin (talk) 21:03, 27 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

As I said, why are you continuing to restore recently added, unsourced, incorrect information. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 21:49, 27 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

[

http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1994QJRAS..35....1M] pp. 5–6 specfies that, after Ross 428, the nearest star in the Alpha Centauri system will "permanently" be Alpha Centauri AB. Other articles, assuming the Alpha Centauri AB-C system is gravitationally bound, state the orbital period is 550,000 to more than 10⁶ years, and Proxima and Alpha would exchange places. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 23:30, 27 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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Recurrence time for the entire Universe

In page 8 of this scientific paper they estimated the timespan until the universe resets (all particles in the same dynamical state). The Poincaré recurrence time for the universe is 10^{10^{10^{10^{10^1.1}}}} years (or whatever since with this order of magnitude the usual units for time are unimportant)